Ivy Covered Walls

Campus Split Over Renovation Of `Harvard's Living Room'

March 03, 1996|By Timothy Jack Ward, New York Times News Service.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — To many Harvard alumni, the Great Hall of the Freshman Union--with its 14-foot-high fireplaces and its antler chandeliers reportedly donated by Teddy Roosevelt--is the heart of the university. To the administration, seeking to consolidate its humanities departments, now spread across the campus, it is space going to waste. For both sides, it has become a battlefield.

Recently, the university began to renovate the slate-roofed, 1902 landmark at the southeast corner of Harvard Yard. Designed by McKim, Mead & White, the Georgian Revival building cost $150,000 and established the campus's "brick revival" architectural style.

The Great Hall, originally envisioned as "Harvard's living room," was used as a freshman dining room from the 1930s until a few weeks ago.

Administrators call the renovation, which will result in office space and lounges and is to be completed in April 1997, a textbook example of ingenious adaptive reuse. Many preservationists and alumni think otherwise.

"Here's one of the greatest spaces in Harvard, by the leading architects of the period--and they want to destroy it," said H.A. Crosby Forbes, Harvard Class of '50, an art historian and a curator emeritus at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

Margaret Henderson Floyd, a professor of art history at Tufts University and a coauthor of "Harvard: An Architectural History" (1985, Harvard University Press), said that university administrators "should not decide which spaces are sacred spaces."

But Philip J. Parsons, director of planning for the university's faculty of arts and sciences, disagrees.

"If you're going to preserve buildings, they have to be used," he said. "And if they're going to be used, they must be made useful."

The $23 million plan for the Union is part of a project that included Robert Venturi's critically acclaimed renovation of nearby Memorial Hall into a new freshman dining room. It was designed by Goody, Clancy & Associates, the Boston architectural firm that restored Faneuil Hall and the Old State House.

The firm intends to split the 40-by-93-foot Great Hall, with its 33-foot vaulted ceiling, into two floors, with three spaces on each. The baronial fireplaces, their original florid andirons still intact, will remain.

A new five-story open staircase will cut through the center, from the basement to the attic. Skylights will be inserted in the roof above the stairs and several new dormer windows will help illuminate attic offices.

The Union is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the university's plans for exterior changes were approved by the Cambridge Historical Commission. The interior is not under the commission's jurisdiction.

Although most of the building seemed easily adaptable for modern offices and seminar rooms, Parsons, the planning director, said the Great Hall "had no use that would be acceptable to the faculty."

"The university does not want to be a museum of buildings," Parsons said.

Some critics have accused Harvard of being deliberately vague about its plan for the building, and of being less than candid in revealing the scope of its plans.

Parsons conceded that a 1989 publication from the university's development office promised that "renovations will leave the exteriors and handsome interior spaces intact."

He maintains, however, that the university has been completely open. "No building we have built has been given so much consideration, or more thoroughly vetted," he said.